Convenient way to enable/disable Hyper-V in Windows 8
This is an old answer but for the sake of completeness and because I knew there was a better way than the top result.
From an elevated command prompt:
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
to disable hypervisor, and:
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto
to reenable it (default value).
Of course it still requires restart.
Disclaimer: I haven't done this for removing a feature, AND as a final caveat there's probably going to be a slew of Windows Update updates to install every time you enable it again.
Having said that, from an elevated command prompt:
dism.exe /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V
and
dism.exe /Online /Enable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V /All
Here's what running the enable command looks like on my PC, which already has Hyper-V enabled and running:
>dism /Online /enable-feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V /All
Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 6.2.9200.16384
Image Version: 6.2.9200.16384
Enabling feature(s) [==========================100.0%==========================] The operation completed successfully.
When enabling the feature since it's Hyper-V it might ask you to reboot and run the command again. That seems vaguely familiar. You could wind up having to reboot twice, in other words. But maybe it won't do it to you since that machine already had Hyper-V enabled before.
You could create two boot entries so you could choose to decide to boot OS system with or without Hyper-V.
- Type the following in the command prompt:
bcdedit /copy {default} /d "No Hypervisor"
- It says:
"The entry was successfully copied to {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}."
- Then type the following command:
bcdedit /set {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} hypervisorlaunchtype off